Coronavirus and the Biblical Quarantine
by
Rabbi Benjamin Blech
Public health officials around the world are desperately trying to cope with the spread of the coronavirus. There is growing fear that a global pandemic may be impossible to stop. So far, this respiratory illness has infected more than 75,000 people and killed at least 2000 to the best of our knowledge. Cruise ships, unwitting tourists, travelers and others are slowly transmitting this angel of death to destinations far from its Chinese source.
Modern medicine, with all of its miracles, is stymied. There is no cure. The best and only solution for now is quarantine. Those suspected of being carriers need to be isolated. Contact with the infected is simply too dangerous.
There is a biblical parallel of quarantine that Jewish scholars viewed from a moral perspective.
The book of Leviticus describes the
metzora, a person afflicted with
tzara'at, a disease commonly mistranslated as leprosy. In fact, the disease is a spiritual malady, primarily caused by speaking slander about others. The
metzora is someone who was, in Hebrew,
motzi ra - an originator of evil talk, and he was to be quarantined, sent outside of the camp, sparing the community from his ability to infect others with his destructive gossip.
Thus, the biblical quarantine was intended not to isolate a carrier of physical disease but rather of moral turpitude.
Coronavirus and the Biblical Quarantine
